Adrian Ridner is the Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Study.com and an industry leader in education technology.
Adrian has created the leading online learning platform in the world at delivering a personalized learning experience to students and teachers from grade school through college and beyond. Adrian has spent the past two decades bringing together academic experts across all subjects, with the leading technologists and learning scientists to build the most innovative micro-learning platform with the sole purpose to eliminate the most common educational barriers and make education accessible.
Adrian has been committed to advancing personalized and engaging learning at scale for students of varying needs and diverse backgrounds to help level the playing field. Study.com's short video lessons and online courses help students achieve their educational goals and degrees needed to unlock economic opportunities. As an Argentine immigrant, Adrian is particularly proud that Study.com helps students, teachers and parents in the U.S. and around the world. He gets excited about each learner that shares their personal story, from every corner of the globe, about how Study.com empowered them to achieve their education and career dreams.
In 2017, Adrian launched the Working Scholars® program as an accelerated pathway to a bachelor's degree offering flexibility, convenience and little to no student debt for working adults. The program has expanded nationally to dozens of cities, uplifting underserved communities one college graduate at a time. Adrian is very proud of the impact Working Scholars is having and humbled that is was named CA Non-Profit of the Year.
Adrian Ridner is the Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Study.com and an industry leader in education technology.
Adrian has created the leading online learning platform in the world at delivering a personalized learning experience to students and teachers from grade school through college and beyond. Adrian has spent the past two decades bringing together academic experts across all subjects, with the leading technologists and learning scientists to build the most innovative micro-learning platform with the sole purpose to eliminate the most common educational barriers and make education accessible.
Adrian has been committed to advancing personalized and engaging learning at scale for students of varying needs and diverse backgrounds to help level the playing field. Study.com's short video lessons and online courses help students achieve their educational goals and degrees needed to unlock economic opportunities. As an Argentine immigrant, Adrian is particularly proud that Study.com helps students, teachers and parents in the U.S. and around the world. He gets excited about each learner that shares their personal story, from every corner of the globe, about how Study.com empowered them to achieve their education and career dreams.
In 2017, Adrian launched the Working Scholars® program as an accelerated pathway to a bachelor's degree offering flexibility, convenience and little to no student debt for working adults. The program has expanded nationally to dozens of cities, uplifting underserved communities one college graduate at a time. Adrian is very proud of the impact Working Scholars is having and humbled that is was named CA Non-Profit of the Year.
Welcome to EdTech insiders where we speak with founders, operators, investors and thought leaders in the education technology industry, and report on cutting edge news in this fast evolving field from around the globe. From AI to xr to K 12 to l&d, you'll find everything you need here on edtech insiders. And if you like the podcast, please give us a rating and a review so others can find it more easily. I'm here at ASU GSV with Adrian Ridner, the CEO of study.com. Welcome to the podcast. Tell us a little bit about study.com.
Adrian Ridner:Hi, thank you for having me. Alex study.com is an online learning platform, we help over 30 million learners and educators on the platform every month, achieve their breakthroughs in learning. And it's really exciting because what we build, we're able to help students from K 12, higher ed and professionals wherever they are in their educational journey. We help them study,
Alexander Sarlin:I got the opportunity to speak to Dana Bryson who works with you in social impact. And I was astounded at the range of the scope of what study.com does. It's really broad. And there's a lot of social impact pieces. What have you been up to recently that are you're excited to share?
Adrian Ridner:Absolutely. And Dana and the whole company does a lot of work. So if you've talked to her before, we're doing a lot of work, especially on teacher diversity and teacher shortage with our keys to the Classroom Initiative. Also, there's a lot of work on access, equal access to degrees with our work in Scholars Program, which is also geared towards people being able to finish their degree and an errand it at no cost and no debt to them. And those are two niches that continue to scale across the country. On the other side, what we're doing on the product side that's really exciting is two things. One, we acquired a tutoring company enhance prep a little bit ago. And we're scaling that not just from our consumer side, but now to help schools, districts and universities to really be able to close the learning gap. So what we're noticing is when districts are able to use our curriculum, our drills on our tutoring, now the tutors know what the teachers are trying to teach. The teachers know what kind of support the students need from the tutors. It gives a much better overall 360s support of the students. So I'm excited about that. And then I'm super excited about what we're doing with AI, we already had a lot of adaptive learning on the platform. But we can really do a lot of new things that we're prototyping and experimenting. And I'm pretty excited about those as well.
Alexander Sarlin:It strikes me I think you're a little bit of an unusual founder and that you're an engineer, founder, and you're been the CEO for the entire length of the company, which is quite a while. And I think that's because your Bootstrap, right, your don't take investment. Tell us a little bit about what that's like all of those specific ideas.
Adrian Ridner:Yes, I'm in software engineer turn, you know, at Tech intrapreneur. And we bootstrapped the company, my co founder, Ben Wilson, I would like to say this, we've been working together in the education space for 20 years now, I will say the current iteration of of study, the SAS business built on top of micro video lessons, and adaptive learning is probably closer to seven, eight years old, we've had this kind of third iteration in this space, but we will absolutely working together and try to make a difference to make education accessible and open doors to the life changing the impact of education for the last 20 years together. And you know, obviously an amazing team. This duration is by far the most impactful on the biggest scale. And when we tell people that I think their work was here at the conference last year mentioned we're one of the few bootstrap unicorns she's met in the space. We take that as a compliment. And let us set our Northstar and be able to follow our values on how we want to have a sustainable growing company that's really making a difference.
Alexander Sarlin:It is really unusual, yeah, bootstrapped unicorn. It's really exciting. So you mentioned AI, and you have an engineering background, I'm sure you know, AI for inside and out. You mentioned that you've done adaptive testing for a long time. But this generation of AI just blows everything we've seen before out of the water, including tutoring opportunities, as well as personalized learning. Tell us a little bit about what you're thinking, as you see Gen a sort of take over the world and at Scott.
Adrian Ridner:Absolutely, yeah, as a software engineer, I like to say I'm an in form optimist on I know enough, I work with neural nets. I've coded them train them enough to understand the downsides of what the technology can struggle with. But I also am optimistic because I understand the real power where this is a step up basis on what we can do. And I think that from my perspective, there's a lot of things that, as you said, it puts the early days of adaptive learning, you know, it looks like child's play with what we can do. Right now. We're doing several things. One is, I like to say is adaptive learning on steroids. So we're combining billions of our data points. With a massive content library that we have, and then using Gen AI to make that learning path even better, if you think about what was our personalization before, you have to customize something for a learner in essentially near real time. And even you had a lot of data point, you have to pre created all of the passwords, other practice or content, delivery, whatever to put them together. Now, you can still do all that. But let's say that you were missing, you know, drills on long, long fractions and long division, and we only have 10, we can have the system, say, make 25 more like this, by the time you get to number nine, there'll be 25 more, you won't have any idea that we didn't have that pathway, because you were struggling with something that maybe most other users didn't. And that's just an example for history can create flashcards in real time. So the amount that we can do, especially if we already have master expert created content at the scale that we do with millions of materials, we can use that train it to generate other things in real time, that will help the different learning paths and he can truly be dynamic, and the real essence on personalized. So that's one example. But also, I'm very excited about a quarter to a third of our subscribers, our teachers were in over 10,000 school districts, they use as their as some of the things that we're releasing are amazing, we can essentially take the syllabus from your LMS. Combine that with all the understanding of what we have in our platform, and create a perfect outline of what you should be assigning every micro lesson, every drill, I think that we're going to be able to do so much with the discovery and personalization. My guess is in a few quarters, searching our site for teachers is going to be irrelevant, because we're we're to showcase everything they need before they need it. The other exciting thing is people think about journey AI as like what it can produce. And that's certainly a big part of it. But when you know Google actually release the initial, you know, GPT general, return transformer technology in 2017, with Bert was one of the starting language better and the large, large language models. And that was for search. So what it can do in terms of taking action and as a user interface where you just tell him what you want. So think of what we're doing now with teachers where they can say, assign this lesson to my first period, they don't have to click on anything, they don't have to click on 17 buttons, they can just say that it knows that if they said this is my homework for my first section, that means the same as assign this to my first period. If it needs to do that, it can ask you okay, what do you want for the homework, if I say next Wednesday, or the 18th, it knows is the same thing, those things are going to make the user experience a lot more user friendly for those that want to interact in that way. So there's a ton of ways that were brought up in and using it, I would say my biggest concern. And I think something that I brought up a lot in conversations this week, is that we need to understand that not all learners are in the same spot. So for our early learners, for those that are in fourth grade, fifth grade or below, we really have to be careful how we use it technology and our children are not guinea pigs, and our kids learning are not guinea pig. So there's really no adult someone in college, maybe in a high school, I can discern information, it can think critically about what makes sense or not, we can really do a lot of interesting teachers, another example. But we really have to be super careful with early learning young children, and do a lot more research, which is part of why we're doing a lot of research and everything I just said before we go launch it, just because it's cool and new, we really want to understand the implications, and the outcomes that it's going to have downstream. You know, they call it out hallucinations, for a reason. They don't call it errors. Because yes, there are mistakes, but there are mistakes that the AI believes that even though are 100%. Wrong, it believes is 100% Correct. And it will tell you so over and over again. And that's what is like a real person hallucinating is not an error or mistake, right? So we have to be careful that we need people to be able to discern that as well. One thing
Alexander Sarlin:that I've heard sort of in the corners of this conference is the need for an LLM that's education specific or you know that is safe that can work with these fourth and fifth graders we have to be very careful with and you know, one of the barriers to that, or one of the enablers of that we should say is having a lot of data. So you've mentioned billions and 1000s of schools and districts, million kids all over the world. I've been wondering if companies with lots and lots of content and lots of lots of interactions, and you're definitely in that category, have the capacity to train models with reliable content and what would what might that look like in your mind?
Adrian Ridner:That's a great point. I think that right now everyone is thinking about it either as using GPT directly as a standalone user for your own productivity, right having to do things or integrate it horizontally into existing platform. There has been some conversation of good Do you create your own, and that's certainly something that, especially for us, would be very, very possible, given the extent of content that we recreated. And the different types and the data. And it's something that is worth exploring. Obviously, the cost today is not trivial people who ask over it, there's a reason we will didn't want to release it. First is definitely expensive on the compute power, but that's going to come down. And that's going to come down pretty sharply. So I think that's definitely a possibility. The other thing that is important for me is combining the people asked, I think, short to medium term, having AI with our educator network over 2500, you know, educators, professors, teachers, tutors worldwide, the combination of the two, just like you're not going to replace the teacher in the classroom, is what's really going to make for the more interesting leaps in learning. So, custom training, you know, large languor model is definitely a possibility. And I think several of us will probably look into playing with that. But I would say, I still would not take the human component out of the equation. And I mentioned yesterday, one of the things that gets lost in this conversation is we're still teaching people, if they're adults, or if their kids, there's a component of teaching that is about human empathy, is understanding that you didn't have food yesterday, or that you have shelter insecurity, or that you need more sleep before you can have the attention span to and understand this equation. And for a lot of children, you know, the teacher or the or the tutor is one of the, you know, often only trusted adults in their life. So we have to also be mindful that as much as the power is super exciting. And as an engineer and software engineer, I am very excited. You know, as I said about social impact programs, this is the one thing that I have been roped back into with the product and the tech team to really look at the strategy more broadly, because it is a step level function of capabilities. But we have to remember those people at the center of it. And ultimately, people learn from other people. People need that this, you know, you ask the best teachers, what's their job, they don't tell you to instruction or to share knowledge, they tell you. My job is to build momentum for my students. Yes, it's knowledge transfer. But it's also self belief, if confidence is motivation. And we can't forget that now. I think AI will enable us to build momentum for a lot of students at scale, and learning and coaching and tutoring together, can really do some really powerful things. But there's people at the center of it. And we just have to be mindful of that as we continue to drive this technologies forward, especially in education,
Alexander Sarlin:I think next year by this conference that that question is going to be the center, it's already beginning to be but it's going to be the center of everybody's product questions and their models is what can I do? What do people have to do? What should people do? How can I help education without even beginning to replace anything? We're all wrestling with it? I've heard it a lot at this conference. And it's such an important question. So what is the most exciting thing that you've seen at the conference, what is really lit your fire this year?
Adrian Ridner:I will show that. But before I do that, one last thing is what you just said reminded me of something else that that I've been sharing, that is really important. And it hasn't been said enough. I think the other thing we need to be mindful as we think about AI and this technology is how we need to include it in primary education, especially in this country, we took way too long debating if coding should be a primary subject or not. Besides math, and English and Science, we cannot take that long debating if AI and teaching kids from an early age about AI, how to use it, how it works, the details on how it works, is needs to be a primary subject, because I think it's been overlooked is going to if we don't do it is going to really increase the inequality of income inequality, overall inequality, not just in this country, but globally, right. I've lived in four countries. And I'm also concerned about the global impact of this. Because if we don't do it, the learning velocity, the rate of learning, that someone who understands how AI works, and can use it efficiently, and someone that don't, is going to be significantly increase, you know, Casselman gap that it's going to be much harder to close them the current income inequality, and overall inequality gap. So we have to really be mindful of that. And we have to get education in AI in our primary curriculum sooner rather than later. So sorry, you reminded me of that. Going back to your question. I think the most exciting thing for me as someone you know, first generation intrapreneur, originally from Argentina, moved in multiple countries is this is the first year and I've been here multiple years now where I've seen a huge amount of first generation especially immigrant intrapreneurs with great idea, terrific passion, just represented everyone, just the amount of diversity overall, not just of nationalities, but even women founders that I've seen this year, whatever Conversations, meetings. Suddenly the competition's that we had, it was truly remarkable. And you can you can sense that, as you're walking around and having conversations, just something that really sets off because I think that's going to lead to and faster innovation. And I think not just a US centric view of the world, but a real global view of the world and learning, which is really exciting and something that or at least for me, felt different this year. Yeah, I've noticed
Alexander Sarlin:that too. And it is incredibly exciting. The the ASU GSB cup pitch competition last night was astounding how many people were coming from different countries were doing amazing things in their local markets that they were then expanding, they already had traction. It's wild and I'm unused to that as well. It really feels like a different style of edtech instead of it being about you know, how's Pearson gonna go to India? What I do silly stuff like that. It's if people are going to local, it's really, really interesting. Adriaan Rittner this has been a blast. Thank you so much for being here with me, CEO of study.com. Thanks for being here on Ed Tech Insider. Thank you. Thanks for listening to this episode of Ed Tech insiders. If you like the podcast, remember to rate it and share it with others in the EdTech community. For those who want even more and Tech Insider, subscribe to the free ed tech insiders newsletter on substack.